Growing Up Hippie
(Page 5 of 5)
November-December 2003
by Adriana Barton from Elm Street
It helps to remember that my mother was widowed with two kids when she was barely an adult herself. She has long since finished growing up. Today, she is a confident woman whose paintings are shown in prominent galleries and purchased for major art collections. I now turn to her with creative dilemmas, as well as issues ranging from office politics to my sex life. My mother and my stepfather have each come to resemble the parent I craved and now aspire to be: warm, attentive, inspiring, and actively engaged in the outside world.
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Mom spent last year showing her work in locations ranging from Newfoundland to the Netherlands. In the same period, my own wanderlust took me to Brazil and the Middle East, where I found warmth and intellectual colleagues in the heart of the Arab world. Co-workers thought I was nuts to hop on a plane to Syria just weeks after 9/11, but my open-minded parents supported my decision to attend the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture in the Islamic World. Before I left, Mom reminisced about her 1966 honeymoon with my birth father in Greece and nearby Turkey, where they backpacked through ancient towns, meditated on ruins, and showered under waterfalls.
In Jordan, after skinny-dipping in the Dead Sea at sunset, I could no longer deny being my mother's daughter. Hadn’t I hung out and jammed with musicians in Brazil and Cuba, in unwitting imitation of her Mexican odyssey? Hadn’t I learned that “normal” is overrated? As an adult, I was happiest when life was a variation on a bohemian rhapsody. After all those attempts to hide my hippie past, this insight was music to my ears.
Adriana Barton is a cultural journalist based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and an editor for Where Magazines. She covers visual art, architecture, and cultures in transition. Reprinted from the stylish urban Canadian magazine Elm Street (April 2003). Subscriptions: $9.95/yr. (6 issues) from 655 Bay St., Suite 1100, Toronto, ON, Canada M5G 2K4;
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